To call a food disgusting is a huge value judgment, particularly when one has not and will not ever try it. It is a favorite in the Philippines but is eaten elsewhere. A processing plant in California actually exports it back to the Philippines, the proverbial selling coals to Newcastle or refrigerators to Eskimos trick. So what is the hullabaloo about? Balut.
If you take a fertilized duck egg which would normally take twenty eight days for the duck to hatch, remove it from the incubator at sixteen to eighteen days, you have an embryonic duck still swimming in its nutrient soup of amniotic fluid. Easy to follow thus far but you sense something bad is going to happen can't you. Here is what you do.
- Take the egg and boil it for a few minutes, a soft boil, and let cool so you can handle it
- Tap the egg on the top to make a finger sized hole, place to the mouth and suck out the fluid
- Remove the rest of the shell to expose the duck fetus
- Season with salt and if you are a connoisseur, drop the whole thing in your mouth and eat
- For the slightly less bold, you could pick out the beak and feet and maybe take two bites
- And don't forget the yolk
- Wash it down with an ice cold beer
Now if you started the beer drinking early in the morning and kept imbibing all day, I can see that by dinner time some Balut might be appetizing but I doubt it. The taste is apparently good, like duck. Traditionally Balut is consumed as a beer snack but is also a common breakfast. It makes bacon and eggs seem extremely refined.
One person said to wash your hands afterwards. It can be messy and the stuff smells. Yum yum. And I thought the lark vomit chocolate in the Monty Python skit was a joke. Maybe they were dead serious.
